“You can be healed.”
“Can you heal my memories? Can you remove the things that were done to me? You think you made me into a killer; Nicolae, but it wasn’t you. It was never you.”
“I taught you to kill, Destiny. No matter how necessary I deemed it, killing was foreign to your nature. It is not to mine.” He was not going to allow her to feel as if she were born a monster. “I touched your mind with mine. I still do. The shadows there are of a vampire’s making, not yours. Already my blood has lessened the burning in your veins. With time we can overcome what he has wrought.”
Destiny shook her head. “I’ve lived with this forever. If there had been a way to fix it, I would have done so already. I may be partially in your world, but I’m also in the world of the undead. I’m unclean. I know it before I open my eyes, before I take my first breath on rising. I’ve killed so many times, I can never remove the blood from my hands.” She looked at him, unaware of the terrible sorrow on her face.
Nicolae saw it and it turned him inside out.
“I examined your memories, Nicolae. I’ve had so many years of studying your mind, the battles and techniques used to kill. You don’t feel anything when you attack. You don’t know hatred. And you don’t know rage. You don’t know satisfaction and joy in killing. I do. Is that what you want in the mother of your children?” She turned away from him, hating him for making her confess her failings aloud. Making her see herself so clearly. “You never felt; I felt too much. I wanted to kill. You had no choice.”
He glided closer, his heart breaking for her. “You didn’t have a choice either, Destiny,” he reminded. “He didn’t give you choices.”
“There’s always a choice. You said yourself that the males can give up their lives rather than become vampire. I see in your mind the steadfast resolve to do so if it becomes necessary… and yet I didn’t make that choice.”
His hand swept down the line of her hair, caught the nape of neck and held her still. “You were not made vampire, Destiny. You are Carpathian.”
“Then why do I feel hatred and the desire to kill? Why am I like him and not like you, Nicolae? Do you think it makes it easier to have you near me, knowing what I am, what I’ve become?” She placed her palm on the wall of his chest, fingers splayed wide, and tried to push him away from her.
He was as solid as a rock, unmoving despite her insistence. “You are not like the monster who stole a child from the safe haven of her home. You are not like the creature who destroyed a young girl’s right to a world of innocence. You are nothing like the depraved one who reveled in torturing and killing others. I see into your mind just as clearly as you see into mine. I know who you are, Destiny. I will always know.”
“Intimacy.” She murmured the word and there were tears in her eyes. “You look into my mind and call it intimate. I call it hell.”
He drew her into his arms. “Your hunger is beating at me. I feel it deep inside me, an endless, empty ache.” His fingers bunched in her hair and he turned her face into the hollow of his throat so that his pulse beat strongly beneath her lips. “I feel how his blood burns like acid in your veins. Let me replace it with my blood. Let me give you that small gift. That is true intimacy, Destiny, knowing what you need and providing it.”
“And what of your needs?” Almost helplessly she rested her head there against his throat. Her mouth was already moving over his skin, the temptation far too great to resist. She could remember the exact taste of him. The feel of his arms, his skin. The power flowing into her body. “What if I can never provide you with what you need? The thought of a man touching me is…” She trailed off, inhaling his scent, taking it deep into her lungs. It could never be. It was too late for the things in his mind.